Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)
Irish essayist, novelist, playwright and poet.
Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.
I can resist everything except temptation.
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.
Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.
Ah! That must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner.
Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.
If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.
Children love their parents. Eventually they come to judge them. Rarely do they forgive them.
Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.
Lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance —
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
In married life, three is company, and two is none.
If it took Labouchere three columns to prove that I was forgotten, then there is no difference between fame and obscurity.
Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. [First used by Wilde in Vera; or, The Nihilists.]
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.
I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.